


Tealeaves

by Beleriandings



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, Names
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-24 07:08:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19718707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: How the tiefling got his name(s).





	Tealeaves

**Author's Note:**

> I'm taking fic requests on tumblr, to celebrate 1000 followers there!! This one was for an anon, who requested something about Mollymauk's circus days.

“ _Empty. E…empty_.”

The word is the first thing that comes; those early memories are a haze of colours and sensations, overwhelming his senses. Everything feels raw, unfiltered, too harsh in its contrast to the cold and the darkness. Some of that cold and darkness has to come up to meet it, and it does, spilling out in words from his mouth, or one word at least.

His earliest memories are the dirt and the cold earth, under his finger nails, sitting alone in a field of flowers and grass that sways in the wind. Now, though, there are people here; they came over the hill in a riot of colour and sound, and they surround him curiously. What do they want from him? He doesn’t know. He wants to ask, but his voice can’t make any word but that one single word.

Maybe that is his name, he thinks.

There are gentle hands on his back, and someone is wrapping a blanket around his shoulders. He is both too cold and too hot, and the blanket is too scratchy and it fills his mind until he can’t think of anything else. He curls up and shrinks in on himself, bringing his knees up under his chin and wrapping his arms and tail close around them, bristling at the hand on his shoulder.

The person to whom that hand belongs is kind, he comes to realise. There is a time – and he doesn’t know how much time it takes, but he knows that it comes – that he begins to seek after the touches, the contact and warmth against his skin. Sunlight is too bright, but he seeks that too, all the same. It feels good on his face; better, at least, than the leeching cold of the earth, which is never quite as far away as he would like.

* * *

He doesn’t have a name. He comes to realise this, when he begins to understand that he has a self at all; all of the circus people have names, but he doesn’t.

They don’t give him one. Most of them don’t use real names in the circus anyway, only a sometimes-baffling litany of nicknames that range from affectionate to teasingly mean to expletives yelled across a grassy field where they’re helping each other put up the tent.

They call him something different each time.

He’s okay with that, to start with. At least until he discovers that a name can be a powerful anchor to hold on to.

* * *

He turns to Desmond, his voice loud to be heard over the din of cheering and laughter in the tavern. “What does it mean?”

“Hmm?”

“The song” he says, indicating the group of sailors. “What does it mean? _Mollymauk_. What is it?”

“It’s a seabird” says Desmond. “Down there on the Menagerie Coast, so I’m told, they have a story that sailors tell. Or perhaps it’s real, I don’t know. But they say there are birds that fly all the way out across the open ocean, on white wings the size of me, from head to toe! Bigger, maybe.”

The tiefling’s eyes are wide. “No! Really?”

Desmond shrugs, a twinkle in his eye, assuming the storytelling aspect that all bards seem to share. “So they say.” He leans in closer. The Knot sisters are leaning in to hear the tale too, now; Ornna seems to be pretending not to listen, but it’s clear she’s as caught up by the prospect of one of Desmond’s stories as anyone else.

“They say that there was a sailor whose ship was followed by one of those great birds. Every night and day he watched it, and every night and day it followed. It began to fill his mind that he should kill it, shoot it with his bow and bring it down.”

“No!” says Yuli, as Mona frowns, nodding in agreement.

Desmond smiles, sadly. “The sailor couldn’t stop thinking about it. So one day, he took his crossbow…” he makes a motion, as though to draw a bow, as the listeners stare, rapt. Even some of the sailors are watching now. “…And he shot.”

“No, no no!”

“The bolt struck the great bird in the chest, and it fell spiralling to the deck, out of the air. But the spirit of the ocean was not happy with his kill; the crew suffered in the storms and in the windless ocean-wastes for his killing of this creature, so beautiful and free.”

“Yeah!”

“Fucking right!”

“Eventually, the crew took the dead bird and hung it around the man’s neck, so that he would remember what he had done, and how his killing of the bird for no reason – this creature of the ocean and the air, beautiful and free – had cursed their vessel and cursed himself forever.”

Everyone cheers, even some of the sailors who have come to listen. “Thank you, thank you!” says Desmond, making sweeping gestures.

The tiefling who doesn’t have a name grins, swirling his drink around in his cup. “It’s a nice word to say. Mollymauk. Molly…mauk. Molly-Molly-Molly-mauk!” He hesitates for a moment. “I think I want that as my name.”

Desmond laughs. “How much have you had to drink?”

“Neither here nor there.” He feels the smile on his face stretching wider; he likes the sounds the name makes, tumbling and rattling around the slightly blurry space he inhabits right now, filling in the gaps.

“…I mean, you could do worse.” Desmond pats him on the head, ruffling up his hair between his horns. “Mollymauk…?”

“Ooh, can we call you Molly for short?” asks Mona, over her shoulder.

“Oh, that’s excellent, and you’d bloody well better!”

* * *

“Mollymauk.” he says, to himself, later, happily warm in his bedroll and slurring only a little. “Yes. I think I’ll keep that.”

* * *

There’s a fortune teller in the town where they stop, a silver-eyed, dapple-grey tiefling woman in her fifties, with her own little wooden cottage She’s the only other tiefling Mollymauk has seen up close, and he’s fascinated by her. Vlka, she’s called, and when he ducks through the door he finds her surrounded by all manner of trinkets and bottles and incense burners and pretty scraps of cloth, and she puffs out acrid black smoke from a pipe that makes his eyes water. Her voice, when she speaks Common, is almost exactly as gravelly as when she speaks Infernal, and he likes her immediately.

She sends him off the first time, when he turns up at her door without any coin. The next time, he shows her a trick, and he fumbles it terribly, but she laughs an ear-splitting, jackdaw’s laugh, and he does it again – purposefully bad this time – and she laughs some more, and there’s a smile in her voice when she calls him and idiot and sends him off.

The next time, he asks her to teach him to tell fortunes, and to Molly’s surprise, she does.

She teaches him to read the cards, and more importantly, she teaches him to read the people that are desperate to see meaning in them.

* * *

It’s the last day before the circus is due to move on. They’re having tea, brewed so strong it’s almost bitter, heavy and herbal on his tongue. Vlka leans her chin against her hand, watching him steadily from under her lashes. “You know what I like about you, little tealeaf?”

He looks up at her, from inside his cup, grinning a little tentatively. “A great many things, I should hope.”

She laughs. “Hmm. Perhaps more than one.” She reaches forward and refills his teacup affectionately. “No” she says, filling her own cup, taking a sip and making a face; the tea has been in the pot too long, it’s lukewarm and a little too bitter by now. “What I like about you, is that you haven’t asked me the _question_ , yet. It’s normally much quicker than this, that people ask it.”

“The… question?”

She rolls her eyes. “People ask, is it _real~_?” She stretches the word out, singsong. “Or if it’s all just bullshit I make up.”

“Why would I ask that?” says Molly, genuinely puzzled. “Makes everything so much less fun.”

She grins, all sharp teeth. “ _Doesn’t_ it?”

“Besides” he says, letting his hands run over the downward-facing cards in front of her. “I don’t actually see the difference.” 

“Well, in one case they might end up happier, and for most it’s not the real magic one.”

He frowns, thinking of an open grave, his own blood that spills on objects and can transmute them to beacons of sparkling light. There is frost and dawn light and magic aplenty inside him, but it’s never made him feel better about a single thing. He looks up, to see her looking at him, with drawn-together brows. “Mmph. Maybe you’re right.”

“I’m always right, my little tealeaf.”

“Why d’you call me that all the time?”

She throws back her head and laughs, a resounding, ragged peal that fills the little wooden wagon, and tosses back the last of the tea in her cup. Then she sets it back on the mismatched saucer, peering into the patterns of leaves left behind. “Ah” she says, pointing. “Just as I thought.”

Molly bends his head forward. “What?”

“A great destiny, unfolding before you” she intones, with a sidelong grin at him; it’s a stock response, that she taught him early on. She laughs when he rolls his eyes. “Alright. Fine. It’s because you can make the tealeaves look like anything you want, just by looking at them differently.” She turns the cup; what had, to begin with, looked like slightly questionable blob now looks a little more like a twisting snake, or perhaps, he thinks, a cluster of flowers. She grins. “And because, compared to the cards, and just between you and me, I’ve never been able to make head nor tail of the bloody things.”

“Well. What a compliment to be compared to them.”

She laughs, giving his cheek an affectionate pat. “If you choose to take it as one.”

He gives her his most winning smile. “Of course I do.”

* * *

The circus leaves town the next day, and Molly sits on the back of the wagon, kicking his feet and playing with Vlka’s old set of tarot cards that she gave to him – on extended loan, she said, but they feel like his now.

So does his name, he thinks, or at least it’s beginning to fit better, to become comfortable and soft to the touch like the second-hand leather boots Gustav got him, or the coat that he’s been stitching into all the long hours on the road.

 _Mollymauk Tealeaf_. It sounds good, said under his breath to himself. He says it again, clinging to it so its rhythm mingles with the trundling wheels of the wagon and the clatter of the horses’ hooves on the stony road, the calls of distant birds as they cross the countryside, headed somewhere new.

**Author's Note:**

> This is actually sort of a section of a longer thing about Molly's circus days that has existed mostly in my brain and isolated snippets of headcanon in my WIP folder, for like….a year or more, and I’ve never managed to write it up as a full fic. But this was fun, and maybe I’ll carry it on at some point...? We'll see :)


End file.
